The following are edited excerpts from an on-stage conversation about the Islamic concept of the human fiţrah, or the natural disposition of the human being, at a public event held at Zaytuna College on April 5, 2018. The conversation was preceded by a talk given by Umar Faruq Abd-Allah.
Hamza Yusuf: First of all, I want to thank you, Dr. Umar, for your talk. The hadith you quoted—“Every newborn enters the world in conformity with nature (fiţrah), and it is the parents who then raise a Jew, Christian, or Magian”—indicates that people are enculturated into customs and beliefs and traditions. But then it says, “The animal is created complete or whole in its nature, so do you notice any mutilations that you do as humans to your animals?” It indicates that the fiţrah is a wholeness in nature that’s there, but the hadith also indicates that there are other possibilities to that inherent or principial nature. I think it’s very confusing for people today to see that human nature is denied. Anthropologists, sociologists, and social scientists have shown that there is so much diversity in the world that [we feel] it is impossible to have some type of human nature that unites us all, as this hadith would indicate.
[The fifth-century BC Greek historian] Herodotus, in The Histories, has a very interesting section where Darius the Great asks about the Greeks, who honor their fathers by burning them, “How much money would it take to get them to honor them by eating them?” And he is told you could give them all the money in the world, but they won’t eat their fathers. They are horrified by that. Then he brings up the Indians, who ate their fathers to honor them, and he says, “How much money to burn your fathers?” And they are horrified by that. Herodotus makes this comment about how customs were so different, even though both were honoring their ancestors. So how do you see this incredible diversity of human expression and its relationship to this idea of a universal nature?
UFA: On the level of the horizontal—which is if you live in a world where you only explain things by reference to other things like them, that is, a horizontal universe—there is no meaning. There is no truth, either. Atheism and agnosticism require a horizontal world. Once you put in the vertical connection—which is to look up to heaven and to look to first principles, the law of non-contradiction, the excluded middle, law of identity, causality, possibility, necessity, impossibility—then you’ve got a tent, and then you have a structure, and then you also have meaning. A lot of the things that we see in our time [result from] this Cartesian worldview that we have, whereby we don’t even know what’s out there. We don’t even know that it is out there. We can’t relate to it.
So you have all these social experiments around gender, and it’s very important to study the genealogy of these ideas. Descartes is the one who gives us the concept of mind in its modern sense. His [concept] is sexless, which is a fundamental mistake. But you have Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and Wilhelm Reich. The sexual revolution is from [Reich], and he meant revolution. You also have Herbert Marcuse, who was a big deal here in Berkeley in the 1960s, [he wrote] Eros and Civilization. So it’s very important to know who gave you this idea, and where they got it from, and what their first principles were. Much of modern thought doesn’t even have first principles. So we want to get our orientation correct, and we want to know why we believe what we believe.
I think one of the great things about Zaytuna is that we learn our tradition—where we get our ideas and how we know them—and we also learn that the West is a tradition, and that these ideas don’t drop out of the sky. There are certain people behind them. I feel that one of the most eloquent and most objective ways to address these issues is to look at where the ideas come from.
HY: The idea of first principles gets into something that is deeply rooted in the essential nature of the human being: the law of non-contradiction.
UFA: That’s the fiţrah also for us. You know the law of non-contradiction, you know the law of the excluded middle, and you know the law of identity. [You know] this is Shaykh Hamza Yusuf, this is Shaykh Abdullah, and they’re not the same. It’s not like you are now him, he is now you.
HY: When I taught logic [to Zaytuna students], I taught them that the law of identity was Popeye’s law: “I am what I am.”
UFA: “I am what I am, and that’s all that I am.” These laws are very important. If you look at most modern thought— if you look at Stephen Hawking and [the film about him titled] The Theory of Everything—everything is a model. Stephen Hawking would say this chair is not a chair. It’s probably a molecular structure, and my model is what makes it a three-dimensional brown chair. This is Cartesian dualism.
HY: When I was in Mauritania, there was a shaykh whose name was Mohammad al-Amin. They called him Mino. When I visited him, I think I was twenty-two or twenty-three; he was I think in his eighties. He told me, “I’ve never wished for anything to be different than the way it was, but today I wish I was a young man so I could go with you to Murabit al-Hajj to study.” Then he picked up some earth and he said, “My advice to you, don‘t get far away from this. This is your mother, the earth.” I think one of the things that technology is doing is it’s really distancing people from just being with the earth. We’re fortunate to be in an incredibly beautiful environment here. There are a lot of places to go. So I think that’s really good advice about being in nature.
One last point and question to you about beauty and the importance of beauty. When the Prophet, peace and blessings of God upon him, was wearing nice clothes and a good sandal, a man asked him, “Was that from arrogance?” And he said, “No, it’s [because] Allah loves beauty.” One of the things that I find really notable about premodern people is that they adorned things. They didn’t have a lot of things generally, but what they did have they always made beautiful. When I was in Mauritania, their traditional pen was a bamboo pen, but they started using BIC pens. But the women would adorn them with leather and make them very beautiful. So they would take the plastic, and they would just do a design on it and then put little frills at the end of it, and the students would write with these pens. When I asked one of the women why they did that, she said, “It’s so ugly,” referring to the BIC pen.
What is the thing in humans that [makes us do that]? Why not just have a functional carpet, why put the tree of life on the carpet? Why not just have functional walls, why put wainscoting with designs? What is that [impulse to beautify] and how do we restore it? You don’t see the caliphate of God in that human being anymore. How is that restored?
UFA: Tell me any traditional society that was not beautiful. Look at the First Nations of this land, look at the Inuit, the Eskimos. Everything they did was beautiful. Look at the Aborigines. You can’t believe how beautiful everything they make is. And we were like that, too. We were a highly skilled society. We were a society of crafts and guilds, and everything we made was beautiful. That’s because God is beautiful, and He loves beauty.
Beauty is the splendor of truth. That means God doesn’t love ugliness. Ugliness is the mark of falsehood. Ugliness means you’ve gone astray. If you love God, you become internally beautiful. That’s the universal routing. Then what you produce is graceful and beautiful—even the way you walk, even the way you talk. Even the words you use [are beautiful], because you want to use beautiful words. You want to know what your words mean.
It is very important to get back this beauty in everything. That makes us human. Al-Māturīdī, who is one of our great theologians, talks about how God holds us back from evil by putting us in a natural setting. We still do evil, but the natural setting tells us this is wrong. This is wrong. This is wrong. What happens, however, when you put people in an ugly setting—broken windows, broken glass, graffiti, rats, and so forth—is that you can’t believe there’s such a thing as truth anymore. You can’t believe there’s such a thing as goodness anymore. That’s why beautification is something we have to do to ourselves.
Beauty is our means, right? Making beauty. One of our teachers who studied metaphysics spent his life studying great metaphysicians. Once he was visiting a particular place in Pakistan, and he came out late at night. He had to be taken to his hotel, but there was nobody [to take him] there. Then out of the darkness came this [rickshaw], and the driver was a poor man. So the teacher spoke to him in Persian—he didn’t know Urdu—and said, “Could you take me to the hotel?” The [driver] answered in Urdu; he could understand [Persian] because the languages are close. The teacher got in the [rickshaw] with this poor man, who began to recite to him from Hafez and Rumi in perfect Persian. [The teacher told me], “In those forty-five minutes, I learned more about metaphysics than I learned in thirty years.” So beauty is the language of truth also. When you put that into poetry, when you put that into rhyme, when you put that into art and into beauty, then everybody gets it. Beauty attracts you then to those meanings.
HY: Thank you. On that note, I want to thank you, Dr. Umar, on behalf of the community here for coming this way. May we benefit from what we’ve heard tonight, and may you all return to your homes safe and sound, and have a blessed sleep with some dream time. May you see beautiful things in your dreams tonight, God willing.
UFA: One of the signs of the end of time is many beautiful dreams that are true. You see, this is one of the ways that God is merciful to you, because you live in a world where so many people don’t believe. So He sends to you these incredible dreams. So may you have beautiful dreams, sweet dreams.
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